Vulture’s Worst-Movie Critics Poll: The Complete Ballots

In total, 146 films managed to infuriate the critics polled for Vulture’s Worst Movies of 2013 — everything from Hangover Part III and Lone Ranger to Upstream Color and Gravity. Some movies may have earned a higher spot on the list if more critics had seen them (remember InAPPropriate Comedy?); others may have been released too late and too close together for true consideration (what will we think of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Saving Mr. Banks six months from now?). Comb through the complete ballots below. A note on methodology: Each mention of a film earned that film one point, with a bonus point awarded each time a critic called out the film as the absolute worst of the year. A half point (and tie-breaker necessity) was awarded for films ranked as second worst. A link associated with a critic’s name indicates that we pulled their picks from a previously published list.

Don Jon. Riffing on critic David Fear’s observation that the “Joisey” stereotypes in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s debut were so over-the-top they verged on inadvertent parody, I coined the term “meta-mook,” which captures only one of the movie’s manifold sins. (I’m almost certain at least some of the Garden State’s Italian-Americans wear shirts at the dinner table.) Scarlett Johansson, who gives one of her best vocal performances in Her, gave one of her worst here, affecting a horrendous B&T accent and playing a misogynist caricature, a woman so old-fashioned she’s turned off by men doing housework.

Prisoners. This onetime contender’s awards chances seem to have died a deserved death, but this mock-moral grime fest is so vile it should be buried under the Kodak Theater. Substituting sophomoric murk for real exploration, the movie spun an increasingly preposterous tale of loss and vengeance, feigning seriousness while jazzing the audience with cheap, stupid twists. Seriously, fuck this movie.

American Hustle. Okay, not really one of the worst, but seriously people? I’ve had table wines with better structure.

Ali Arikan, DipnotTV, RogerEbert.com

5. Spring Breakers. Utterly pointless, which would be fine, but also feckless and insipid.

4. A Good Day to Die Hard. It feels as if Bruce Willis, the film’s producers, and myriad writers spent more time trying to work “Die Hard” into a phrase than they did on the rest of the production. But at least the film reaffirmed my faith in the magic of the movies when it took John McClane only an hour to drive from Moscow to Chernobyl. So, every cloud …

3. Movie 43. It’s not funny; it’s not iconoclastic; it’s not juvenile. Instead, it is a cynical artifice, like a dildo with a Mickey Mouse face at its business end. Come to think of it, Movie 43 could have used a Mickey Mouse dildo or two …

2. Only God Forgives. In “The Critique of Instrumental Reason,” venerable German philosopher and critical theorist Max Horkheimer discusses the eventual value of the Enlightenment. He posits that the whole thing was a major fiasco since it failed to create a fully rational society. Horkheimer also makes use of the phrase “pseudo-individuality,” a blanket damnation of modern culture in general where works of art make claims to uniqueness, yet betray nothing of the sort upon even arbitrary examination.

I wish I could have seen Only God Forgives with Horkheimer. I just love the image: There I am in a dingy cinema in one of the fauxhemian districts of Istanbul with my new chum, Max Horkheimer. We sit down to watch the film. Sometime around the ten-minute mark, he turns to me and, in a thick German accent, simply says: “What a piece of wank!”

1. Kick-Ass 2. Here’s a plot for a film:

Man living normal, workaday life. Goes to work, comes home, has his tea, walks his dog. All normal, everyday stuff.

Then, he slowly starts to notice that shit things are being considered good. As if the meaning of concepts is shifting. This goes on until everything bad is seen to actually be good. The second half of the film is his descent into what appears to be madness but in reality is a sort of radical sanity.

The climax to the film is a scene in which he uses an ax and a massive gun to break into a huge skyscraper. He fights his way up floor after floor, and then finally comes to a darkened room. In it is a sort of monkey — gibbon perhaps — in a huge leather chair, smoking a cigar, and flinging its shit at a huge screen rigged up to a supercomputer.

They fight, the monkey is defeated, and the man returns to everyday life. Only thing is, he is reviled by society for having destroyed utopia. The final scene is him, in a cinema, popcorn in hand, looking horrified at Kick-Ass 2 playing on the screen, and realizing that he hasn’t changed a damn thing.

At Any Price. Of all the really bad films seen and/or released and/or endured through gritted teeth this year, Ramin Bahrani’s latest may have been the most heartbreaking. Here’s a “neo-neo-realist” filmmaker with an impressive back catalogue — Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo — that reaches for social significance and lyrical heights, and achieves both effortlessly. Whether his Lifetime Channel movie-writ-large about the plight of the Midwestern farmer (starring Dennis Quaid and a tantrum-throwing Zac Efron) was crossover bid or not, it’s still a tone-deaf melodrama that doubles as a major misstep for a talented artist. Slumming does not suit him.

Epic. Maybe the post–Toy Story animated-movie renaissance has inflated our expectations, and we now expect a certain standard re: storytelling, characterization, sophistication, appealing to young and old, etc. But in a year of mondo crap-animation features (The Croods, Planes, Turbo), no long-form toon felt more like demographic pandering and cynical corporate buck-mongering than this Fox joint’s hodgepodge of stock fantasy elements, lame comic relief, celebrity-voice miscasting, and generic moralizing. Or, for that matter, made you feel so unclean that you needed to take a Silkwood shower afterward.

A Good Day to Die Hard. Why hast thou forsaken us, John McClain?!?

The Hangover III. Imagine your worst hangover — say, that time you drank the mezcal worm out of that bottle of Tijuana hooch in college, then woke up naked, covered in monkey feces, at the San Diego Zoo. Now take that experience and multiply it by three. It would still be preferable to this travesty.

The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. Geography was never our strong suit, either.

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

5. CBGB

4. The Lone Ranger

3. The Purge

2. Trance

1. The Smurfs 2

Ed Gonzalez, Slant

5. Mama. A film whose only genuine shock is its prehistoric notions of the maternal instinct.

4. Blue Caprice. A superficial depiction of the Beltway sniper attacks, racist in its portentous style and denial of moral complexity.

3. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The description for Matthew Fox’s baddie from Alex Cross could also apply to Ben Stiller in this execrable fantasy: “rogue, stimulus-seeking sociopathic narcissist.”

1. Lone Survivor. With the wit and sensitivity of the worst first-person shooter, this travesty reduces the American solider to a mere human meat puppet, asking us to masochistically delight in what their bodies can endure during wartime.

At Any Price: By trying to graft a Greek tragic framework onto a tale of economic desperation in the American heartland, Ramin Bahrani ends up with something at once boneheaded and surprisingly hateful. With an overly ingratiating Dennis Quaid and a dumbfounded Zac Efron vying for most agonizing performance.

Only God Forgives: Oedipal “themes,” Kubrickian pomposity, and a script that sounds like it was written by your annoying 12-year-old cousin who just started watching R-rated movies. More abject garbage from contemporary cinema’s biggest trash peddler with delusions of grandeur.

I’m So Excited: Well, we’re glad someone is, Pedro! The once-great Almodóvar goes back to the well for more hilarious rape jokes, this time set aboard a passenger plane so leaden with tired stock characters it’s amazing it’s able to leave the ground.

The Lords of Salem: Rob Zombie trades his visceral aesthetic for a series of suffocating art-horror tableaux that look like a succession of Korn album covers.

Out of the Furnace insulted the very heartland characters it purported to honor by portraying them as repeatedly incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions.

After Earth: It’s the future. They have cool hologram communications devices and rocket ships. But in order to fight this fierce, homicidal predator beast, all they’ve got is a spear? The metaphors in this film had a denser atomic weight than uranium.

Free Birds is the worst idea for a kids’ movie I’ve ever heard — turkeys go back in time to prevent pilgrims from serving turkey at the first Thanksgiving by giving them takeout pizza.

The Lone Ranger: Two great train-chase sequences divided by endlessly inane claptrap and a painfully bad performance by Johnny Depp.

To the Wonder: All I can remember are sun flares and twirling.

Gangster Squad

Romeo & Juliet: All you need to make Romeo and Juliet work is teenagers with a lot of chemistry and no messing with Shakespeare’s words. 0 for 2.

The Hangover Part III: Provoked a distaste so pervasive it made me retroactively like the first one less.

Only God Forgives: A stylish director can make seamy characters and ultra-violence feel sophisticated and meaningful. Not this time.

3. After Earth. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film in which the text and subtext — both concerning an effortlessly gifted father who presses his less-talented son to follow in his footsteps — were so completely in alignment.

2. Grown Ups 2. Opened with a deer peeing on Adam Sandler and went downhill from there. You know you’re in trouble when Taylor Lautner is the funniest member of an all-star cast of comedians, and he’s only in the movie for five minutes.

1. I’m So Excited! Pedro Almodóvar shrill, grating comedy was the kind of lazy, homophobic picture he used to mock and subvert at the start of his career. Aren’t those mincing homos hilarious? Especially when they lip-synch to old disco songs!

5. Frances Ha. Somehow, the irrepressible charm of the least-capable mammal in New York was lost on me. I dig Greta Gerwig, but Frances Ha is little more than an explication of how good it is to be blonde and cute when one lacks talent, focus, maturity, drive, accountability, problem-solving skills, and an innate sense of self-preservation.

4.The Counselor. Forcing viewers to sit through two hours of pseudo-academic word vomit, just to see a few cool ways of separating people from their heads, is nearly as brutal and inhumane as devising cool ways of separating people from their heads.

3. Gangster Squad. Maybe the cliché-riddled script with plot twists evident from miles away is forgivable. Maybe they get a pass for sidelining a talent like Emma Stone as the gangster’s moll. But slapping a Dick Tracy villain mask on Sean Penn, while asking an audience not to repress its giggles? They go too far!

1. After Earth. Honestly, I didn’t know Jaden Smith was a movie star. In my defense, neither did he. Is it unkind to say mean things about a child who’s only trying to do his best in a film? Yes, it is, which is why you should blame his father for buying him his own big-budget sci-fi misfire, complete with marquee director (M. Night Shyamalan). Maybe now Will Smith will stop trying to make “fetch” happen.